Aesop as Litmus: The Acid Test of Children's Literature

"Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee."

Job, xii. 7

The basic English children's edition of Aesop's Fables is by Sir Roger L'Estrange and came out in two volumes, 1692 and 1699. After establishing in his introduction that his book is "for the Use and Edification of Children," L'Estrange goes on to insist that

Nothing spoils Young People, like Ill Example; and that the very Sufferance of it, within the Reach of Their Ken, or Imitation, is but a more Artificial way of Teaching them to do Amiss . . . Now this Medly, (such as it is) of Salutary Hints, and Councels, being Dedicated to the Use, and Benefit of Children, the Innocence of it must be preserved Sacred too, without the least Mixture of any Thing that's Prophane, Loose, or Scurrilous, or but so much as Bordering That way.

A normal enough sentiment, of course, but interesting in the light of some of the fables that follow it. On page 7, for example:

Socrates and Calisto

There happen'd a Dispute betwixt Socrates and Calisto; the One, a Famous Philosopher, and the Other, as Famous a Prostitute. The Question was only This; which of the Two professions had the greater Influence upon Mankind. Calisto appeals to Matter of Fact, and Experiment: for Socrates, says she, I have Proselyted Ten times as many of Your People, as ever you did of Mine. Right, says Socrates, for Your Proselytes, as you call them follow their Inclinations, whereas Mine are forc'd to work against the Grain. Well well! says Lais (Another of the same Trade,) the Doctors may talk their Pleasure, of the force of Virtue and Wisdom, but I never found any Difference yet, in all my practice, betwixt the Flesh and Bloud of a Fornicator, and that of a Philosopher; and the One Knocks at my Door every jot as often as the Other.

No philosophers and fewer fornicators knock on children's doors these days. The difference in attitudes that this suggests may be significant.

The L'Estrange edition of Aesop set me thinking about other editions of Aesop, before and after 1699. Were there any? What were they like? Where did they come from? What or who was Aesop, for that matter? And did all this bear looking into, anyway? Perhaps, there was more to Aesop and his fables than that certain dusty ennui that I remembered from my childhood—after all, that courtesan had a point, didn't she? And if only I had heard of it when young, things might have turned out differently. As it was, I had had to wait for High School and Freud to discover what any well-bred eighteenth century tot would have known from his nursery days.

Even the briefest of histories of Aesop's Fables is complicated. It turns out that there were, for instance, several hundred editions and variations of Aesop before L'Estrange. Beginning, it seems, sometime in the sixth century, B. C. And in at least a score of basic languages. None of these editions were for children (children, of course, were not invented until the seventeeth century); but much of the content of these editions came to be considered particularly suitable for children (which is an interesting fact in itself: must certain kinds of great basic literature eventually end up the exclusive property of children—folk tales, ballads, fables, myth, the Bible?).

It seems likely that a man named Aesop did exist in Greece in the sixth century, B. C. He was a slave, seems to have lived in Samos, and most probably died a violent death at the hands of the Delphinians. Joseph Jacobs, the eminent Aesop scholar, argues that Aesop did not invent the "beast-tale with a moral" (as he calls it) but rather invented a new use for it. Before Aesop it was used to amuse children; Aesop used it to convince men, to make political points in the age of the tyrants when direct speech...